


In Proper Time

by Humbuggy



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Coda, F/M, POV Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers-centric, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 06:33:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18632746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Humbuggy/pseuds/Humbuggy
Summary: There are certain things that must be returned to where and when they came from. The future waits as Steve returns the infinity stones to their own times.*** ENDGAME SPOILERS ***





	In Proper Time

 

* * *

 

‘How can I?’ Bucky says, ‘You’re taking all the stupid with you.’

There’s an old joke there and Steve steps back, Mjolnir by his side. Bucky looks at him and gives one of those smiles; close lipped, wan and warm. It feels … good. Settled somehow. Their positions have reversed, but neither one of them needs saving anymore. After so long – so, so long – they are equals to one another. His friend is no longer a ghost that needs laying to rest. Neither is he someone that Steve is desperately running after; trying to save him, trying to live up to his shining figure, trying to bring him home.

Steve can’t let things go – he knows this now – but he can be content with this.

Bruce gives him the nod, runs him though the procedure once more; five stones, exactly back when and where they’d been taken from, and a universe held in balance once more.

Mjolnir is a comforting weight in Steve’s hand as Bruce counts down. There is a flutter of something deep within his chest. Anxiety, maybe. Perhaps purpose.

‘One,’ Bruce says.

And then Steve is falling, once again, through time.

 

——— **REALITY** ———

 

Asgard is strange. A golden city he has never seen and that no longer exists; shining and dissonantly familiar through the open walls of the room he finds himself in.

Steve is not alone either.

The woman who stands before him lifts her head with a regal, intelligent air as she studies him. She seems overly calm for a woman who has just had someone appear before her.

‘You must be Steven Rogers,’ she says. ‘But not, I think, the same one that my son has told me of.’

There was no one else this could be.

‘Lady Frigga,’ Steve says.

She smiles at him and Steve has a moment where he understands why Thor speaks of her the way he does. Rarely, but always with deep love and unflinching respect. Some people you love too much to talk much of – this is something he understands as Thor does. Lady Frigga reminds him, hazily, of his own mother. Sarah Rogers had the same bearing; dignity and strength paired with the compassion of a queen.

He swallows heavily, unsure if he should bow or nod respectfully.

In the end he settles for saying, ‘Thor, my Thor, speaks of you too.’

Frigga smiles again – a mother’s smile, all fond and quiet with love – and Steve, aware of passing time (though that doesn’t really matter) and stomping feet echoing close by, says, ‘We won. Thanos is ended in our time.’ Then, ‘I think Thor will be okay. He’s… strong.’

The reality stone in its container is heavy in his hand as Steve places Mjolnir at her feet.

‘These belong here,’ Steve says. ‘But we made good use of them.’

‘I have no doubt.’

She takes the stone from him, the metal container strange and ugly in her golden hand.

Thor had never quite made sense in the context of Earth; too large, too loud, shining with too much light. But here… yes, Steve can see him here. Here where Thor can never return – not in this time or their own.  
Sometime he thinks that tragedy follows their lives like a dog.

The sound of running feet are louder now, pounding down the corridor.

‘Lady Frigga,’ Steve starts – filled with some desperate urge to … what? Warn her? Tell her of the future? This is the day she dies.

‘Safe travels, Steve Rogers,’ Frigga says. It’s an interruption and a dismissal, though not without kindness.

Steve swallows his words and gives her a nod. ‘Your Majesty.’

Time falls away and he falls too.

 

——— **POWER** ———

  
The rain is truly miserable. It reminds him of his first war – where the mud was everywhere, sticking in the back of his teeth like the worst kind of grit.

Steve steps over the body of Quill, pausing for a moment to check his pulse and to kick away one of the nastily sharp-toothed lizards looking at Quill with too much interest. Quill would wake with a knot on the back of his skull and a nasty headache but injury free. Rhodes – or Nebula, whomever it was – knows how to judge a hit to the back of a head.

It’s easy to get to the stone’s chamber. The protections here mostly consist of things that have decayed with time or have already been overcome. When he sets the stone’s alien container back on its’ plinth, there is a beat as he steps back and the bars protecting it snap back up again with a hiss of plasma. It feels too simple – but then everything not world-shakingly hard seems simple now.

In the distance, Steve can see Quill climbing to his feet with loud and laboured swearing, groaning fit enough to wake God.

Yeah. He’ll be fine.

There’s no reason to stay even if Steve had wanted to.

Steve presses the button on his watch for his next co-ordinates and falls again.

 

——— **SOUL** ———

  
The moment Steve arrives is the moment he realises that he doesn’t want to be here. It’s a mistake coming so soon. He wasn’t ready. But then, Steve doubts, would he ever be ready?

Natasha’s body would still be warm.

For a moment his lungs crumple and all he wants to do is let his body follow suit with the terrible crush of it.

But he’s an old hand at staying standing; keeping his spine straight, his legs atlas-like beneath the unearthly weight of it all. He continues to breathe. His heart does not falter in its beating.

Captain America. Standing tall. Carrying on.

Steve clenches his fist, shoulders the shield Tony had made for him. ‘I won’t make another,’ Tony had said. A lie. There’d been a spare in Tony and Pepper’s cabin home, all painted and perfect. Damn the man.

_Move_ , Steve tells himself.

There is a job to do and time is wasting. (Though time doesn’t matter. He can waste it as he wants.)

‘Steve Rogers, son of Sarah Rogers.’

The voice strikes from the recesses of his worst memories.

The shield is on Steve’s arm in a second and he wishes he hadn’t returned mjolnir so soon.

‘Red Skull,’ he spits. ‘Hydra never stays dead, huh?’

‘Peace,’ says the voice from the shadows, ‘I am not an enemy here. Not now, in this time, this place.’

Red Skull draws himself out from the shadows; a floating spectre robed in smoke and memory.

‘What are you then,’ Steve challenges, turning to keep the shield facing this new threat.

‘A penitent. An overseer, charged with the keeping of something you have come to return.’

Steve clenched his jaw. ‘The stone needs to be here.’

‘Yes.’

He can hear leather creaking from the tight grip of his fists. There’s no anger to the Red Skull, but nor is there righteous conviction either. That, more than anything, convinces him that this is not the same being he fought so long ago.

‘Come,’ Red Skull says and Steve follows.

He can’t quite relax, no, but he allows his shield arm to fall to his side.

‘Natasha – Nat,’ he starts, ‘her body – ’

‘What is given may not be returned.’ The keeper looks at him and the compassion on Skull’s face is the most alien thing Steve has seen. It’s a cognitive dissonance that sends shudders twitching through the muscles of his shoulders and down his back.

‘Her body is no longer here. The exchange is whole.’ Red Skull holds out one smoke-wreathed hand, palm outward. ‘See, if you must.’

And as Steve steps forward, he can see bits of broken arrow, a scorch mark from an explosion, scuff marks in the dirt. He should’ve known that neither Nat nor Clint let the other go easily. The marks are still fresh.

The drop yawns cold and lonely before him, the far-distant ground empty of all things. He can’t even see blood marks.

Steve closes his eyes, thinks of Natasha; his friend, his teammate. She deserved better than this but she’d made the choice.

She’d lain herself on the wire; her ledger wiped clean and scales tipped.

‘The stone?’ He asks, voice heavy and words rolling too harshly from a reluctant throat.

‘Let it fall.’

It is a strange relief to open the container and upturn it over the drop. The soul stone tumbled in the bitter air; turning over and over until it vanished mid-fall. Returned.

‘It’s done?’ Steve demands.

‘Yes. Once more, I am its guardian.’

Steve nods shortly and turns away, unwilling to look at that empty drop any longer. A glint of something on the ground catches his eye and he stoops to see it. In the dirt lies a used widow bite. He fingers the small bit of burned out tech, turning it over between forefingers and thumb. When he places it in a pouch, it’s with a sentiment Steve had thought himself beyond.

It is an ugly relief to let the time stream swallow him up again. He would never return here. With luck, nobody else will either.

 

——— **MIND** ———

  
He’d left Earth for last. It hadn’t exactly been a conscious decision, but it’s one that feels right somehow.

Banner had programmed him to land right in the atrium of the Avengers Tower – Stark Tower. He takes the mind stone, returned to it’s sceptre, and places it at the hand of his past self, where he lies unconscious on the granite flooring. It’s barely been seconds since his past-future self has left. His past self, the self of so, so long ago, seems all-too young and fragile as he lies there.

For a moment, Steve wonders what will happen here in this time where Hydra-that-is-Shield exists and thinks this captain is one of them; where Loki has escaped; where this person, his past self (a past self) has been told that Bucky is alive.

For a moment, he is compelled to linger. Compelled to wake up this past self to help him and explain. The future (his past) is a messy place, but there are people and a place for this man. There is a need for him; and though there is pain, there is also purpose. Would Steve save this Captain from the blows of a too near future? Could he? Would he?

And though Steve has time, (as much time as he wants; days, months, years. A future frozen and waiting.) he cannot linger.

There are two more stones to return – one in this very city as of twenty minutes ago. (Days ago, years ago, in a minute’s time).

He closes his eyes, letting the time stream take him again.

 

——— **TIME** ———

  
As on Asgard, there is a woman waiting for him. The empty eye container she wears around her neck makes it clear who she is; the Sorcerer Supreme before Strange. He likes this one no better.

‘Banner?’ she asks as he places the time stone in her palm.

‘He’s okay. He stayed behind to activate the portal. I volunteered for the return trip.’

The Sorcerer nods, casting him a calm once-over that peers too deep – uncomfortably knowing – into the flesh and marrow of his bones. Despite himself, he cannot help but straighten his posture under her regard. Parade rest is something he might never shake.

He’s not sure what she’s seen in him before she breaks her gaze off, placing the stone back in the amulet and closing it up with a gesture. There is a sighing sound in her exhale of breath, as if something has been retuned returned to the air – oxygen, a concern removed, a duty restored. All of which is true, in a way, he supposes.

‘Congratulations,’ she says finally, ‘you have but one more to return.’

‘The pasts we altered,’ he starts. ‘I don’t have any memory of them.’

Not of Loki disappearing, nor of a fight with his own-self, nor of any other butterfly wing-beat changes that might have occurred in the course of time travel.

‘Nor would you,’ the Sorcerer Supreme says, turning on her heel to look over a damaged city. ‘As I explained to Banner earlier, you have created splits in the timelines. Going back into the past isn’t merely … going back into the past. The universe allows for no paradoxes, so long as the things that must be returned are.’

‘So the Thanos we killed and his army …’

‘In his time, he is gone. In this time, he lives. In your time, he destroyed the stones and was destroyed himself. All different streams of happenings splitting away from your own river of time.’

She looks over her shoulder at him. Again, there is a sense of being seen though; too knowing. Too wise.

‘What you’re intending on doing will not hurt your timeline. When you change it, it becomes anew. If you must think of time as a substance, then think of it as water in a great delta. You dart in and out as a diving bird does.

‘I’m not intending on anything,’ Steve says to her, tucking his thumb in a belt loop.

She doesn’t make a sound, but something about her air carries the feel of impassive disagreement.

‘As you say. The last stone, Captain. See it safe.’

Resisting the urge to throw her a salute, Steve adjusts his watch and slipstreams back and back in the wash of time.

 

——— **SPACE** ———  


He had left this stone until last on purpose. _No Lingering_ , Steve tells himself.

Get in, return the tesseract, and leave.

The future, waiting, frozen. (His past, waiting, frozen in the future. His past waiting in the here and now).

Sam. Bucky. The ones who remained.

His bones ache. They ache, and ache, and ache.

Getting back in the fort is easy. No one is looking for a long dead super solider. Even the shield is easy to hide. All he needs is a place to return the tesseract. Back in the sub levels would be sensible. No one would realise what exactly had happened to it it, even if they realised it had gone missing at all. And yet … he pauses by Peggy’s office.

Somewhere the ghost of Tony is saying, ‘ _Got a life. You should try it._ ’

(Somewhere in the future, Tony is dead. Somewhere in the future, Tony is alive.)

Steve curls his hand around the phantom strap of a shield in his hand. A fight has never been a thing Steve has ever been able to put down. There have never been enough reasons to stop, and too many reasons to keep going.

He can hear Peggy’s voice inside her office, dismissing someone on the phone followed by the click of a handset on a receiver.

He’d never had reasons.

Bucky would be okay. Sam would too. A future waiting. A moment suspended for his return. (A few days, a month, a year).

His hand is shaking as his places it on the door handle, presses down, pushes forward –

Peggy looks up as the door opens. The demand on her face drops away; shock and suspicion edging to the slack of her jar, the curve of her mouth, the knit of her her brows –

‘ _Hello Peggy_ ,’ Steve says.

 

###

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> I saw endgame and I was dying to know what happened when Steve returned the infinity stones - and then I went, ‘hey, I can write that shit’, so I did. This turned into kinda a weird semi-angsty, semi-character study story that I’m kinda fond of in all it’s hasty glory.
> 
> Comments, kudos! They make my day everytime! (Do you want author’s notes? Behind the scenes specials? Comment and I will pour brains and story matter into your waiting arms!)


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